Under the term “sculptural
drawings” is understood, in the strictest sense of the word, the graphic
preparation for a sculpture. This is applied as a medium for sketching the idea
for a sculpture or for a relief, and expresses the relationship between solids
and voids by means of emphatically linear representation. Given the
form-shattering upheavals in three-dimensional artistic creativity in the 20th
century, which have been described by Rosalind Krauss using the concept
“Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” sculptural drawing also freed itself from
the functional work.

In the exhibition “On Paper”,
curated by the sculptor/ metal sculptor and college teacher Sepp Auer, the term
“sculptural drawings” is in this sense construed rather as a loose signet,
which permits a multitude of possibilities of two-dimensional composition. Auer undertakes a broad survey of the art of
the Second Republic with a few international guest appearances. From
Wotruba-Student Josef Pillhofer to Bruno Gironcoli, Walter Pichler, Franz West,
Erwin Wurm, Monica Bonvicini to younger
practitioners such as Toni Schmale, Marusa Sagadin, Valentin Ruhry,
Micha Payer&Martin Gabriel, Ovidiu Anton.

He exposes sculptural drawing as
an open system, that often amounts to nothing more than the solipsistic
reflection on possible- and impossible spaces, and, in the abstract evocation
of the texture of the materials, allows the “Field of Things” (Heinz Emigholz),
as an intellectual impression, to appear even more sculptural.

The renderings/photos by Erwin
Wurm, which can be seen in the framework of “On Paper” and in which his entire
bizarre Pluriversum seems to be contained as if in a nutshell, the collages
with photos of complicated systems of pipes which Stef Heidhues has produced,
the red rectangles semantisized with sense- and sense-destroying statements by
Monica Bonvicini, or the cubes nested within one another by Antony Gormley, are
all individual/idiosyncratic articulations of ideas of space. They are the
proof of an attitude of experiencing the world within artistic parameters and
making it the subject of creative expression.

Precisely in the restriction of
form to idea, unfolds the richness which lies in the potential of that which is
indeed thought through, but not completed.